Would you mind sharing some DETAILS of your season progression?

After playing only non-ladder with my kids (and sometimes with friends) for about 2 years (and taking a half-year break since last summer), the Warlock update brought us back. We never played ladder, so I insisted on playing a ladder season at last. Starting from scratch was strange initially, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. I thought it could be useful to hear about preferred strategies from many players, so that new ladder starters can learn and decide what they like.

We managed to bring together a team of 6 players at the end of February: a paladin and 5 warlocks (it was kind of inevitable, but different builds: 1 Echoing Strike, 1 fire, 1 boiler, 1 Abyss, and 1 summoner). Playing through the game was smooth: it took about three weeks because we are casual players and spend less than 10 hours with playing each week. Only Echoing Strike (supported by a constantly cursing fanatic Hephasto) and Abyss could handle most situations with budget gear, though. I could improve our gear via trading, but lack of a fire sunder charm was a pain, and new sunders were out of our reach. To improve my son's experience with his fire build, I ended up trading a -89 Fire sunder for an Ist from a guy who imported this item from LoD, which helped a lot. Farming was a bit ineffective, though, especially for keys and statues (I hated that statues were behind a time gate and we mostly missed terrorized bosses, only playing a few hours on weekends). Farming Terror zones was good, though, and we found our very first Jah rune in a terrorized jungle (which I traded for a 19/16 warlock torch).

We decided to level 3 new ladder characters with my kids in the spring school break: a Blizzard Sorceress, a singer Barbarian, a fire Warlock, and one friend joined as a summon Necromancer until mid-Hell. With pre-farmed gear and skipping some parts of Normal and Nightmare (one of us could join with the high-level character and TP a waypoint), completing the game was very easy within 2 weeks. We finished around level 80.

Then came more farming and respecs: Sorceress playing fire ball- Meteor in full Tal Rasha set with 3x -5 enemy fire res facets and the above fire sunder, Echoing Strike warlock, and the Barbarian - my son was a singer for a while, but War Cry was weak on p3 and higher acts, so when he found a Lo rune, I traded it for a very well-rolled Grief and he turned to Frenzy. It played very well with cursed fana Hephasto on the team and Sigil Lethargy for tanky enemies

We tried to get new sunder charms, once we even terrorized all acts in Hell: clearing everything took 10 hours, we killed about 20 heralds in a row, 12 produced a second drop when horked, but no luck. I think that was the most we played in a day (with some breaks), but it was neither healthy nor worth it. We also did a bit of speed farming for keys and statues: basically the barb boosts the sorc with lvl 33 or so BO, then she (myself or my daughter teleports through everything and easily kills Andy, Summoner (to know which tomb to go to) and Duriel, and Meph. We always did Diablo and Baal waves together. As casual players, we killed the ubers only once (using a different team: barb, ES warlock with Heph, Abyss warlock with Lister) and got a druid torch . We have keys for a second try (maybe tomorrow).

We also killed the colossal ancients twice, first aiming for a fire jewel (which we got: +7/-8, went into the Tal's armor) and second for a magic or lightning jewel (we got +7/-9 lightning). This will be very good to put into Griffon's Eye for our non-ladder characters: I love the farming speed of our top geared Energy Shield Nova sorceress. I use her much more often than the Lightning Fury Amazon or Mosaic sin (I actually hate the Mosaic playstyle so she is stuck at lvl 85). We managed to reach lvl 94 with the ES warlock, that is as high as our top non-ladder characters (ES Nova sorc and Dragondin).

Will we play in the new season? Definitely no, because we won't spend 5-10 hours a week again playing: we can play non-ladder once in a while, and access to our 2-year Wealth to upgrade our warlock gear will make our new chars even stronger. There is clear power creep: new sunders, colossal facets, and -enemy magic res items for the already strong Hammerdin and Abyss/Miasma builds (yes I know FoH and Bone Necro also, but these can do well only in certain parts or not so good at higher player count). Heralds can be a new challenge, but I don't think these are well optimized yet.

In the future, if we play a ladder season again with our usual p3 family team, we would definitely start with a sorceress (nothing beats the speed of native free of Charge Teleport), a Barbarian (amazing support character with BO, survives aggro well, and horking corpses is huge), and the third one would probably be paladin (native aura, easy ubers with obtainable gear, Blessed Hammer magic damage is OP, etc), although others would also complement well. Warlock will still be strong after the nerf, summon necro is also very strong in a team (native curses, Corpse Explosion, and it can kill ubers using revived urdars, we did it on non-ladder), and we always liked playing Fury/summon druid as part of the team with max Oak Sage on non-ladder playthroughs.

These are of course only my thoughts, and obviously other strategies could also work well. Anyway, would you guys mind sharing some details of build choices, availability of team, memorable events worth noting during your season, etc?

Finally, good luck and have fun in the upcoming new season if you decide to go for it!

I played this ladder with my sister & we both started w sorc, she went lightning/ Frozen Orb, & i went Hydra/ Frozen Orb, respecced to pure Fireball which i didn't like, and eventually settled on Demon Machine enchantress which has to be one of my fav sorc builds now!

We did a few Key/mf runs while levelling our second chars, for me a summon necro and her a smiter, w the goal to do ubers to sell torches. I did a few uber runs solo on my nec until we got her smiter geared, at which point i became basically a support necro haha. It was a great duo for ubers though! We spent most of the ladder farming torches together, i also levelled a summon warlock bc of course, and once we had built up the runes my sister respecced her smiter to a dreamdin

I think your plan makes a lot of sense, honestly we went in with less of a strategy and more just played what we both were interested in trying and it worked out. Though we have different schedules so the bulk of it we played separately

Next season i think i'll go blizzard sorc first, but i want to try out a Lightning Fury amazon (with some points in Impale to do ubers). I've never really played amazon so i'm excited! My sister wants to try out Nova sorc which should be great w the tz changes

The dlc was an amazing present, we all didnt expect to come from blizzard and my friends and i all played this season together, just like we last time did back when d2r started fresh.
We all tried different builds to mostly not needed the same items together, which made the progress overall smooth and interesting.
We all played warlock with different styles:

1x Friend with Blood Boil with Tainted
1x Friend with Summon Goatman and Bind Demon
1x Friend with Echoing Strike
1x Me with Abyss

In the end we made the grind to all get our anni and torch + we were able to find 3 latent Sunders on our own: Cold, Bone, Poison.

We really had much fun this season and we will stick together again on the next season.
Im really happy the dlc brought us all together again and lighted up the old fire of playing diablo coop as we also did as kids before even d2r.

Im not quite sure what everyone of my friends will play the next season, but one of my buddies and me had the unusal idea to both maybe play as a fire skilled character:
1x fire rangerdin and 1x enchantress together while both wielding a Kuko Shakaku or Demon Machine to see how far we can push the fire damage and to make it more challenging, because we both suffer from the same immunities then. This will be challenging and fun i guess and it feels more equal from the perspective of the strength between characters. We HAVE to coordinate each other to have success this time (lets be honest, playing warlock was just a walk in the parc - even with the crappiest mf/ Gold farm gear no Herald had any chance at all).